Old Fogy | Page 6

chamber concert heard Schubert's
quintet for piano and strings, Die Forelle--and although I am no trout
fisher, the sweet, boyish loquacity, the pure music made my heart glad

and I wept.

III
THE WAGNER CRAZE
The new century is at hand--I am not one of those chronologically
stupid persons who believes that we are now in it--and tottering as I am
on its brink, the brink of my grave, and of all born during 1900, it
might prove interesting as well as profitable for me to review my
musical past. I hear the young folks cry aloud: "Here comes that
garrulous old chap again with his car-load of musty reminiscences!
Even if Old Fogy did study with Hummel, is that any reason why we
should be bored by the fact? How can a skeleton in the closet tell us
anything valuable about contemporary music?"
To this youthful wail--and it is a real one--I can raise no real objection.
I am an Old Fogy; but I know it. That marks the difference between
other old fogies and myself. Some English wit recently remarked that
the sadness of old age in a woman is because her face changes; but the
sad part of old age in a man is that his mind does not change. Well, I
admit we septuagenarians are set in our ways. We have lived our lives,
felt, suffered, rejoiced, and perhaps grown a little tolerant, a little
apathetic. The young people call it cynical; yet it is not cynicism--only
a large charity for the failings, the shortcomings of others. So what I
am about to say in this letter must not be set down as either garrulity or
senile cynicism. It is the result of a half-century of close observation,
and, young folks, let me tell you that in fifty years much music has
gone through the orifices of my ears; many artistic reputations made
and lost!
I repeat, I have witnessed the rise and fall of so many musical dynasties;
have seen men like Wagner emerge from northern mists and die in the
full glory of a reverberating sunset. And I have also remarked that this
same Richard the Actor touched his apogee fifteen years ago and more.
Already signs are not wanting which show that Wagner and Wagnerism

is on the decline. As Swinburne said of Walt Whitman: "A
reformer--but not founder." This holds good of Wagner, who closed a
period and did not begin a new one. In a word, Wagner was a theater
musician, one cursed by a craze for public applause--and shekels--and
knowing his public, gave them more operatic music than any Italian
who ever wrote for barrel-organ fame. Wagner became popular, the
rage; and today his music, grown stale in Germany, is being fervently
imitated, nay, burlesqued, by the neo-Italian school. Come, is it not a
comical situation, this swapping of themes among the nations, this
picking and stealing of styles? And let me tell you that of all the
Robber Barons of music, Wagner was the worst. He laid hands on
every score, classical or modern, that he got hold of.
But I anticipate; I put the coda before the dog. When Rienzi appeared
none of us were deceived. We recognized our Meyerbeer disfigured by
clumsy, heavy German treatment. Wagner had been to the opera in
Paris and knew his Meyerbeer; but even Wagner could not distance
Meyerbeer. He had not the melodic invention, the orchestral tact, or the
dramatic sense--at that time. Being a born mimicker of other men, a
very German in industry, and a great egotist, he began casting about for
other models. He soon found one, the greatest of all for his purpose. It
was Weber--that same Weber for whose obsequies Wagner wrote some
funeral music, not forgetting to use a theme from the Euryanthe
overture. Weber was to Wagner a veritable Golconda. From this
diamond mine he dug out tons of precious stones; and some of them he
used for The Flying Dutchman. We all saw then what a parody on
Weber was this pretentious opera, with its patches of purple, its stale
choruses, its tiresome recitatives. The latter Wagner fondly imagined
were but prolonged melodies. Already in his active, but
musically-barren brain, theories were seething. "How to compose
operas without music" might be the title of all his prose theoretical
works. Not having a tail, this fox, therefore, solemnly argued that tails
were useless appanages. You remember your Æsop! Instead of melodic
inspiration, themes were to be used. Instead of broad, flowing, but
intelligible themes, a mongrel breed of recitative and parlando was to
take their place.

It was all very clever, I grant you, for it threw dust in the public
eye--and the public likes to have its eyes dusted, especially if the dust is
fine